Wolverinebass

Alembic have been without a UK distributor for almost 20 years. The last one was The American Guitar Centre down in Ashford Kent and they hadn't done anything for years before they ceased trading. However, this may be a good thing, if of course Bass Direct can ever get the peeps at Alembic to answer the phone or email. Whilst I got the issue I had sorted out, trying to get hold of them (I appreciate the time difference before anyone says) was really frustrating. It all got sorted out really quickly when I did and they are lovely people who honestly couldn't do enough for me. Just they don't seem to reply to emails or answer the phone very much at all. Which reminds me, I have had something I've been putting off sorting with my Stanley Clarke for more than a year because of fear of this happening again. But, we can see how that pans out.

That is perfectly true to a degree of course. In my world (recording studios), there has been a joke that we can't be replaced as that would require the clients to actually know what they want in the first place. However, what I see probably happening is AI being used by streaming companies to skew the amount artists get by flooding and pushing the system with AI created music. At that point, not only am I obsolete in terms of my job, but so are the artists. Who has the money then? Oh, it's been sucked upwards. As with all things, it's what you use it for that determines what your viewpoint is. In my view, this stuff is being pushed in a direction so that staff can be cut and the bottom line for shareholders/companies can be increased, no matter the human cost involved. Like that healthcare CEO who got shot a few weeks back. His company were using defective AI to assess people's claims (read as deny 90% of them out of hand) which they knew about, but didn't do anything because they were making so much money from telling people to "f-off and die." That's the world we live in and frankly, I think it sucks.

It's because the people/corporations who are developing AI in all likelihood don't give a toss about improving people's lives. What they want is to suck up the cash from creative fields so they don't have to pay for photographers, music (in any way), copywriters. The rest of us will be doing a lot more than the laundry forever as to improve people's lives and reduce all the menial crap we all have to do is not what this is being developed for. That sort of idea would require a fundamental reset of society and that's not happening ever as billionaires and massive corporations aren't going to give up a penny for normal people. Ever. I look upon AI as just another tool whose fundamental aim is to suck money upwards to the top. Sure, it'll have it's uses for us near the bottom, but to me, that's the ultimate aim.

True, he's not solely responsible and yes, things were inevitable in that way post Napster. I was merely illustrating that the guy doesn't value music and never has. I don't know what you think is "negotiable" when the guy is actively trying to pay us less by any means possible whilst he's making hundreds of millions of pounds a month. The royalty rates will never go up. Ever. Spotify have cornered the whole market and as such won't play ball. The whole "made up artist" thing to me reeks of fraud, but because it hasn't been legislated, he's going to get away with it. As for the snowballing thing. Considering the cost of touring, that's a very different question which again, doesn't have an optimistic answer sadly for most smaller artists. Anyway, as I say, streaming is great for discovering new things. A bit less so for actually being paid for your work.

Maybe you should realise one of the people responsible for enabling quite a lot of that piracy is Daniel Ek who was the CEO of uTorrent. Nowadays he's being both the arsonist and firefighter by running Spotify. A legalised form of theft if you will.

I think it's important to separate your opinion on Spotify and steaming in general from Ek as a person. Streaming is useful for finding things and testing the water. It's unfair in how much musicians are paid, but that won't change anytime soon if ever. Now, let's get on to Ek. He's a tech bro who though Spotify makes more money in a quarter than Paul McCartney has in his whole life being the most successful songwriter in history. In 2013, Q magazine did an article on Spotify and although they couldn't work out if it made a profit from the actual music, they did work out that they were making $73 million a month from the adverts. Okay, fair enough. Ek has come out with ludicrously tone deaf comments about how if musicians want paid more they should release more music. This is whilst he's lobbying governments to lower the royalty rate musicians get. Now, for the really insidious part. Have a read of this. https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-ugly-truth-about-spotify-is-finally?utm_source=multiple-personal-recommendations-email&utm_medium=email&triedRedirect=true Basically, Spotify are paying artists flat fees to write songs then putting them out under multiple artist and song names to skew the amount they have to pay everyone else. In other words, just wait until AI becomes more of a thing. They'll become more aggressive with playlists, yet actively feed this stuff to the top to avoid paying anyone anything. In Wall Street 2 Shia LeBouf asks Josh Brolin how much it would take for him to retire, saying that most people have a very specific figure in their head for how much it would be. Brolin smiles and just says "More." That is what you're going to get with Ek. Nothing is going to be enough. The minimum stream number will only continue to rise. 1000 isn't much. How would you feel when it reaches 20,000 per song to get anything at all? How are you going to feel when he undoubtedly wins in his quest to bring the royalty rates down? Or as he quietly pushes AI or in effect "muzak" to pay musicians even less by reducing their percentage of the daily streams, by increasing the stuff he controls? Look, I'm an originals musician. I appreciate that the technology is out there and the genie can't be put back in the bottle to pre 1998, nor do I deny the usefulness of streaming as a whole. All that being said, I think Ek is a criminal who is making obscene amounts of money from ripping us all off. He has used the weakness of the record companies in the wake of Napster to build a vast fortune. It is however, being done by stooping our backs and systematically crushing us. The fact that people in reasonable arena level touring bands have to do multiple projects/businesses/teaching and whatever else just to live is wrong to me. I won't get to that level, but I object to a jumped up little tosser like Ek ripping us off, then trying to take away the merest crumbs from the table that he gives us, whilst telling us to "work harder" as he trys to reduce our amount of crumbs to atoms.

It makes it easier due to ergonomics. How your arm sits basically. Whixh is also why one likes it. It makes you feel more connected to what youre playing due to using the same position.

I have always regarded Glyn Johns as a tosser for that. Those songs could easily have taken a more overdriven sound. Can anyone really pick out what Entwistle is doing on Bargain? No, because all the treble has been cut off. What about WGFA? The bass is so low in the mix it's criminal. This approach reached it's absolute nadir on Who By Numbers where the bass not only has no treble, but no sustain either. You can't even hear the bass in huge parts of that album. The drums sound terrible too. It's a terrible mix, mainly because he's turned the guitars and vocals up way too much. Who Are You has better drum sounds, but that's because Jon Astley recorded them.

The irony of that clip is that Pete Townshend saying Entwistle was one of the first people to move away from "duummm, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum dum" type playing. Then ironically that's exactly what Entwistle does albeit in a slightly altered way. The tone in itself isn't actually that difficult to achieve as long as you can do parallel processing like on an HX Stomp. Whether or not you like the 1999 bassy/distorted/chorus tone he had is another question entirely.

Live at Leeds by The Who. Arguably one of the greatest live albums ever recorded. With a precision. Which cuts through. Weird that. I've got a 2017 classic 50's precision. No doubt with crap wood and pickups. Strange that I've never had a problem cutting through. Could it be through a knowledge of eq, effects, overdrive and where the rest of the band sits in the overall frequency spectrum might have something to do with it? Not all basses are good for all things, true and I choose basses for different projects based on how they should work sonically, but the assertion that passive fenders don't cut through isn't true at all.

Yeah, I guess nobody could hear that precision on Live at Leeds because it was passive. Maybe if you're doing clean with no treble and the tone knob rolled off then yeah, nobody will hear you. Pile on the treble and maybe a judicious use of distortion and your thought about passive instruments "not cutting through" doesn't work in any way. That's regardless of how many musicians in the band.

A very comprehensive review. A quicker one would have been to say that it sounds like crap and nothing like the original. Considering the bloke from Polymath who regularly does Ashdown demos did one shortly after the PMT demo fiasco and it sounded like crap didn't really look good did it? There will be no online reviews from anyone as Ashdown won't take the chance of someone saying it's awful. Not from Patick Hunter, Low End Lobster, Bass the World or any of the many, many bass influencers or youtubers. None of them. Plus, the fallout of saying that Ashdown have made an absolute turkey will mean they'll never get sent anything to review from them again.

The simple answer is in my case, not very easily. In one band, I write quite a lot of the music. Ironically in that band, we'll be looking for a new guitarist and singer post new year as our guitarist recently became a parent and one of the singers has had health issues and had to leave. They aren't going to be easy to replace as the material is really progressive and quite Tool like. In the other band I'm in, although I don't write, it's a trio and the amount of space I have to fill is not something that a lot of people could do easily. In fact, there has been a joke by the guitarist about live "every song is a bass solo!" which although isn't true, is almost true. Were I to leave that band, they'd probably need a 2nd guitarist as well to fill all the gaps. Also add to the fact that I'm producing the material of both bands, it wouldn't be easy. Not impossible by any means, but certainly difficult as it were.

As someone who has seen @NancyJohnson play, I can say that he's being modest about his ability on bass. Or as a songwriter for that matter. I for one am very specific when it comes to what types of bands I'll be involved in. I don't think that's being egotistical, just that I know what I want and that I'm quite happy to search for it. As such, the 2 bands I'm in now are exactly right for me at this moment. Ironically, one of them is my own band. At least nominally. I sporadically get asked to join or audition for a band and I'll generally have a listen and decide based on that. More often than not, I'll decline or I might play one gig to test it out if I've got nothing on or am vaguely intrigued. There are a lot of bands or people who think that they are amazing and just aren't. For me, I want being in a band to be something I enjoy and the other members do too. I don't want to be the best musician in the band, nor do I want to be the sole songwriter. I like the collaboration and comradery if you will. I would like to say for comedy value that both bands only tolerate me as I'm producing the material for free, but in all seriousness, that's not true. There is a running joke in one of them as to how much the album would have been if they'd paid me and every so often I'll figure it out and have a laugh about it. Hey, it gets me a free lift to gigs! It's worth saying though that I spent about 18 months looking for things or people before I got where I am now.

In about 2001 I was looking for a bass to take the step up to a better instrument as I'd moved to London. Something striking. A bit mad. Ironically, those last 2 things have informed my bass choices ever since. I immediately thought about the Auerswald. I got quoted at £17k when I emailed about it. No discussion of specs or anything. Just a flat price. I bought an Alembic at the Bass Centre instead, which ironically was cheaper. Now, that Auerswald bass hasn't even been listed on the website for years and quite frankly, I'd still buy one, but I shudder to think how much it might be now. Surely someone must do a knockoff AliExpress or whatever version?